The Dirt Sherpa Build

[riveroceanandmountain]

Keep the pictures coming!

I love it!

I want to see every detail!...... I am very inspired and will be borrowing some of your ideas..... hope you keep on sharing

[GCecchetto]

hope you keep on sharing

Will do. Maybe I'll see you up in BC, my family is from Revelstoke. If I have this thing finished by next summer I'll either be headed out to Colorado or up to BC.

[redthies]

Your tie downs are fantastic. Using the tailgate cables is a great idea. I'll be watching this one!

[SLO_F-250]

Looking good! I like those tie downs! Where did you get them? Pricey?

[Overland Hadley]

Looking good! I like those tie downs! Where did you get them? Pricey?

http://www.torklift.com/x.php?w_page=derringer_fastgun

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...ht_1392wt_1141

[Mark Harley]

Nice idea on the tie downs.

[GCecchetto]

Sorry about the lapse in posts. It's been busy at work and I have been burning on the camper every spare minute I have in an effort to get to the siding install. I have a lot of misc metal fab that has to happen before I can get the aluminum plating at the back end powder coated and it needs to be powdered before i install the siding. The plan at the present is to try to get the cabover bed floor installed this weekend. I'll do a detailed post with photos sometime this weekend.

[GCecchetto]

Well, it's been a weekend of frustration. It's been foggy tree rain all weekend and I'm building the camper in my dirt driveway. Unfortunately I have no garage so I'm stuck dealing with the weather. I got some good progress made on my aluminum steps storage system, but need a few misc pieces of hardware to complete them. Also got the Baltic Birch ply cut and laminated with the fiberglass siding that will be the floor of the bed in the cabover. This is where things started to go wrong. I used 3M's slow cure 5200 adhesive sealant to laminate the panels. Crane composites, mfg of the siding, recommends cleaning the back of the siding with isopropyl alcohol, so I cleaned the back of the siding with IA. Unfortunately I forgot that 3M says not to use IA because it affects the cure. I'm not too concerned about this as I let the panel dry thoroughly. What I am very concerned about is that I left the bottle of IA on the work table with the cap off and my son spilled it on the back of the siding on the adhesive. The IA quickly flashed off and the adhesive seemed unaffected so I reluctantly laminated the ply and siding. The slow cure 5200 is really slow curing so I won't know if I'm screwed for days. The other misery for the weekend was snapping the tip off of my impact drill in one of the screws in the aluminum protection plate on the back of the camper. A piece of the tip is stuck in the screw head so I won't even be able to drill out the screw head. As if all this wasn't enough I realized that the frame of the camper is 1/8" out of square, which wouldn't normally be a big deal, but the old roof from the FWC that I need to use for this season is an 1/8 out the opposit direction so it looks like I might have some fun getting the roof back on it. Needless to say it has been a frustrating weekend and and didn't stop long enough to think about photos. I think I'll just stick a pencil in my ear.

[GCecchetto]

Got the screw extracted after work today and some progress made on my tuck away aluminum steps. It also appears that the adhesive on the cabover bed floor is curing okay, so I think I might have dodged a bullet on that on. Hopefully I'll get panel installed in the cabover this weekend.

[GCecchetto]

The weekend is off to a good start, no fog this morning! I'm hoping to have a productive weekend. Just shot the second coat of epoxy paint on the exposed aluminum section of the bottom of the cabover. I decided to forget about the external tubes on the back of the camper as it was creating a scheduling nightmare with the sequence of events to get to the siding install, so I'm dropping off the last of the aluminum parts that have to be powder coated and installed prior to siding at the powder coater today. Hope to have the floor of the cabover in, the siding on the cabover and the radius corner fillers in most of the openings by the end of the weekend. I'll defenetly take some photos to post.